QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Creating Items

The best time to create items is after you've created your accounts, but before you start billing customers. Each item links to an account in your Chart of Accounts, so creating items goes quicker if you don't have to stop to create an account as well. Similarly, you can create items while you're in the midst of creating an invoice, but you'll find creating items goes much faster when you create one item after the other. The amount of time it takes to create items depends on how many items you need. If you sell only a few services, a few minutes should be sufficient. On the other hand, construction companies that need thousands of items often forego hours of data entry by importing items from third-party programs (page 515).

Each type of item has its own assortment of fields, but the overall procedure for creating items is the same for every type. With the following procedure under your belt, you'll find that you can create many of your items without further instruction. If you do need help with fields for a specific type of item, read the sections that follow to learn what each field does.

Figure 4-5. Within each type of item, QuickBooks lists items in alphabetical order. You can change the sort order of the Item List by clicking a column heading. If you click it again, QuickBooks toggles the list order between ascending and descending order. To return the list to sort ...